my talk from the capitalist state book event
Thank you to everyone who came to the book event today for the capitalist state book I have a chapter in. I thought all the presentations were great and the Q+A was thought provoking.
I've put my short talk on my chapter below in case anyone couldn't make it. If you've been reading my stuff regularly this won't be news to you, that's your fault for not using your only life on something better, like, well, I can't think of anything better, due to the limits of my own imagination. (Consider me an object lesson: I live this way for the good of humanity. You're welcome.) Anyway, my talk's below. Before that, two things. One, this is a link to the page for the book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-36167-8. If you have access to a library where you can make order requests, please request your library order it. (No one's making any money here, I just want people to read this stuff.) Two, this is the web site of the Marxist Education Project, who hosted the event: https://marxedproject.org/. Check out their stuff and if you've got any spare dollars, consider chucking some their way.
Alright here's the talk, prepare to whelmed, whether over or under:
hi everyone, I’m Nate Holdren. Nice to be here with you today, thanks for coming. My chapter does two things. It lays out an analysis developed by Friedrich Engels and fleshed out further by Karl Marx, that capitalism is a necessarily death-dealing system, and then it situates the capitalist state in relation to that analysis.
Engels used the term social murder to name capitalism’s tendency to kill specifically via the ordinary, normal operations of apparently apolitical social and economic life within the system. That’s in Engels’s 1845 book, the Condition of the Working Class in England. There’s been a relatively recent revival of this term, after the Grenfell Tower Fire in 2017, I’m an example of that revival. Uptake of the term was further expanded since the covid pandemic started in 2020. Part of the I argument of my chapter is that the phrase on Engels’s part is not just a rhetorical flourish but is a theoretical analysis on his part and which Marx further developed.
Basically, every position that members of the proletariat inhabit in relation to the circuits of capital is a position where harms tend to be generated. As sellers of labor power, the work we do tends to harm our health in various ways. The commodities we buy as means of subsistence tend to have harmful elements, because our subsistence is a secondary priority, the primary priority being to valorize value. Commodities we need to live and to thrive are often priced too high, and pay can fall, so we can’t afford what we need, and often things that meet our needs are only produced when its profitable. Many people end up unemployed as well, in part as a result capitalism’s tendencies to produce so-called surplus populations and toward crises, so that again people can’t afford a good life.
The space in and around the physical locations of commodity production tend to be polluted by the waste from the production process, and likewise for the spaces in and around the transportation of goods. The waste of production reshapes the nonhuman natural world as well so that it becomes less hospitable and more likely to generate other sources of harms. We now know that commodification of nature makes pandemic disease more likely as well, both by exposure to novel pathogens as with covid-19 and the risks of factory farming as well, and we’ve known since Engels that conditions of life in capitalism foster the spread of disease. Over all, that we live in a society where things like silicosis, asbestosis, black lung diseases, carpal tunnel syndrome, pandemic disease, and so on are all recurring part of the social world makes complete sense given the system’s logic. Part of what my chapter does is to lay out this analysis in more detail and show how Engels sketched the beginning of this analysis, and Marx fleshed it out in more detail in parts of the first and third volumes of Capital.
Another thing my chapter does is to argue that capitalist social relations in general appear in particular concrete contexts - we don’t live in capitalism in general, we live in a specific concrete location within a particular version of capitalism - and those contexts change dynamically. Furthermore that change tends to be a change to continue: capitalism’s logic as a system tends to press any specific version of capitalism to transform, which is a kind of dynamism, but it’s a transformation into a different specific version of capitalism, so it’s really a matter of fundamental continuities over time. This is part of why we need marxism, in order to see that the problems in capitalist society are problems of capitalism and are not merely local, contingent problems. With regard to social murder, the tendency to social murder manifests in particular concrete contexts that often appear as disconnected from each other - it’s not immediately apparent what links black lung disease, derailments of trains carrying toxic chemicals, the opioid epidemic, and covid. That means efforts to mitigate harms and demand resources for harms are likely to start from a condition of being siloed from one another.
The other thing my chapter does is to discuss the relationship between social murder and the capitalist state. The state encourages the tendency for struggles against social murder to be siloed, by treating struggles over social murder as discrete, as composed of different subjects - victims of black lung disease, victims of toxins in groundwater, etc. It also presses those struggles not to get too militant - not to become disruptive of capital accumulation - which also limits their ability to win. The state presses on struggles to be system-compatible because the state’s role is to secure capital accumulation and maintain the character of the economy as not subject to conscious, direct political re-organization by collective action.
Furthermore, I argue - and here I’m borrowing from other thinkers, like Tony Smith, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Simon Clarke - that capitalism is characterized by a division between a domain that appears as apolitical, namely the economy, and a domain that appears as political, namely the state. In reality, economic life is a set of political practices appearing in depoliticized form. By the same token, the state is more focused on maintaining the depoliticization of social relations than it’s a site of any meaningful politics.
Struggles over social murder, like all social struggles, are eruptions of politics and the state tends to channel them in ways that constrain the scope of that politicization in order to leave capitalism’s basic logic intact. One result is that even when struggles over a specific form of social murder are successful - as with Marx’s discussion of the English Factory Acts in volume 1 of Capital - the result is locally terribly important but at a more macro level the result is not that social murder in general ends but rather that the specific site, concrete victimized population, and particular manner of conducting social murder changes. So in Marx’s account of mid-19th century England, we get a shift from people being worked to death by long hours into people being torn apart by machinery.
This means over all that the state is an accomplice to social murder, often one that appears as the sort of good cop relative to the economy as bad cop. To mind, this entails that while reforms to capitalism and can be literally life or death sometimes for actual people, they are nevertheless not a substitute for revolution, though the state tends to pressure us to think it is such a substitute. As such, we should see reformers from above as likely to be enemies of the working class and accomplices to social murder, even if unwitting. We should see reformers from below as people who need to be won over to revolutionary ideas - reform movements from below need to be actively, consciously radicalized in their analysis of capitalism, and developing concrete revolutionary anticapitalist practice remains terribly urgent. Until capitalism is abolished by a genuinely emancipatory social revolution, real people will continue to be destroyed in various ways by the system.